In Cursed, Joanna Tokarska-Bakir investigates the July 4, 1946, Kielce pogrom, a milestone in the periodization of the Jewish diaspora. This massacre compelled thousands of Polish Jews who survived the Holocaust to flee postwar Poland. It remains a negative reference point in the Polish historical narrative and represents a lack of reckoning with the role of antisemitism in postwar Polish society and identity politics.

Tokarska-Bakir weaves together the voices of the Kielce pogrom survivors, witnesses, and perpetrators with a myriad of other archival sources. Her meticulous research exposes wartime and postwar biographies of local factory workers, city and church officials, local police officers, and members of the security service, some of whom participated in the Holocaust and then directly or indirectly participated in the Kielce pogrom. Tokarska-Bakir paints a social portrait that explores people's behavior in light of forces and emotions greater than themselves. She reconstructs a postwar communist system that, despite promises to combat deeply rooted antisemitism, not only failed to prevent its spread but turned a blind eye to it and eventually used it to legitimize itself.

Cursed is a microhistory that recreates the events of the Kielce pogrom step by step and examines the dominant hypotheses about the pogrom through the prism of previously classified archival evidence. It offers readers a nuanced analysis that cuts across social and ideological divisions. The resulting narrative is filled with new discoveries not only about the Kielce pogrom but about the nature of antisemitism, hostility toward minorities, and collective violence.

Published in Association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Joanna Tokarska-Bakir is Professor of Humanities and Chair of Ethnic and National Relations Studies at the Polish Academy of Sciences. She is the author of Pogrom Cries, Jewish Fugitives in the Polish Countryside, and a number of other publications on the ethnography of the Holocaust. Tokarska-Bakir received the 2019 Yad Vashem International Book Prize for Pod klątwą, of which Cursed is an abridged English translation.

Tokarska-Bakir forges a new, excellent methodology in Cursed, offering a useful framework to study processes of establishing communist power in an important period of modern Polish history. Her novel microhistorical analysis of the Kielce pogrom is a remarkable contribution to the historiography of the twentieth century in Central Europe.

Yehuda Bauer, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and author of Rethinking the Holocaust:

Cursed is a meticulously researched, anthropological masterpiece. Joanna Tokarska-Bakir provides a detailed socio-political analysis of not just the victims and bystanders of the pogrom, but also of Polish society at in the aftermath of the war. It will be impossible to examine postwar Polish history without taking this story into account.